Yes...but!

November 5, 2007

Home > Columns >Yes...But! Year 7-53

In 1993 I bought "Living within Limits", a book with the subtitle, “Ecology, Economics, and Populations taboos.”

When I read it some 14 years ago I wasn’t greatly disturbed by it, although I did underline some passages. Now re-reading these marked paragraphs I find them deeply upsetting.

You see, in 1993 Oil Peak was a remote possibility. We then still lived in ‘forever’ land. Today, suddenly it seems everything has an expiry date, including oil. This has frightening consequences, because there is a direct connection between oil supply and food: what we eat depends entirely on oil. We now need 10 calories of energy to give us one calorie of eatables, and much more when we consider transportation from land to mouth.

You probably have never heard of Hubbert’s pimple. Dr Hubbert, when employed by Shell as a geologist, correctly predicted in 1956 that US oil production would peak in 1972. He then set out to calculate the World’s Peak Oil time and produced a graph depicting the short history of fossil energy. He drew a 10,000 year time line with 0- 2000-2010 - at its center. On the zero he projected a structure – something like the Eiffel - or the CN Tower, actually a steep mountain with a narrow base indicating all fuel supplies, covering some 150 years from 1900-2050 with minus 1,2,3,4,5, or 5,000 years in the past to the left and + 1,2,3,4,5 or 5,000 years in the future to the right. That’s Hubbert’s pimple, depicting the oh-so limited time-span of the world’s fossil energy. The steepness of the graph is clear when we know that oil use jumped from 100 million barrels per year in 1900 to 31 billion today, a 310 fold increase. The decrease follows an even steeper trajectory. .

We are now at the top of a narrow plateau, looking into the oil-less abyss. Since food is oil, it is no coincidence that the number of people increased at the same rate. A graph of the world’s population would look quite similar. For some 5,000 years the total of our planet’s inhabitants remained quite low, not reaching the one billion mark until 1800. Thanks to the emerging energy resources it then doubled by 1928. After that, fossil fuel caused it to more than triple in less than 80 years. In other words, oil equals food equals people. It’s equally true that no oil means little food means few people.

We are now at the start of the dangerous descent from the top of the Oil Peak. The Energy Watch Group estimates a drastic drop to 20 billion barrels in 2020, to 15 billion in 2030, to 9 billion in 2040 and to a mere 5 in 2050. Does this mean that food and greedy mouths will decrease in that same ratio?

What is plain is that we are entering a very perilous period in the history of humanity, a phase unlike any other, where we have to re-adjust our life style to one “Living Within Limits,” where nature and the human race must exist in balance, totally unlike today, where we have used up the earth’s capital – stuff stored for millions of years – in a matter of decades.

We know that life as we live it now cannot continue, witness climate change, disappearing species, increasing cancer rates, just to name the most obvious. Dr James Lovelock calls this process “The Revenge of Gaia.”

Two hundred years ago the world functioned quite well without oil or coal. If the Energy Watch group is correct, then in about 40 years we are down to a skimpy 5 billion barrels of oil, more than an 80 percent reduction. Does this imply that the number of humans will decrease by that number as well?

The World Watch Institute e-mailed me last week that the world’s population had reached 6.6 billion. That number startled me because it reminded me of 666, which Revelation 13:18 calls “The Number of a Human Being.” An 80 percent reduction from 6.6 billion is 1.32 billion, not too far from the year 1800’s total, an era before the Fossil Revolution.

Even that low number may be too high. In 1800 Iowa had 6 feet of top soil- now basically gone. Today our sacred earth is much polluted and will, therefore, yield less food, while fertilizer, once natural gas is gone, will no longer be available. Combine this with the forgotten skills of survival and a population of 500 million looks more realistic.

No wonder re-reading “Living Within Limits” gave me a frightening jolt. Whatever will come, it will come much quicker than we are ready for. My wife and I have 12 grand children ranging from 2-24 years. They will pay for your and my follies. May the Lord be gracious to us. Let us pray that all this will take place by as non-catastrophic progression as possible.